The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, April 20-26
Blow Out (1981)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Five years after tormenting a prom queen in De Palma’s adaptation of Carrie, John Travolta and Nancy Allen reunited with the baroque stylist for this voyeuristic thriller. Travolta plays a B-movie sound technician who becomes entangled with a femme fatale (Allen) after accidentally recording a possible political assassination. Like Antonioni’s Blow Up and Coppola’s similarly paranoid masterpiece The Conversation, Blow Out‘s murder investigation doubles as a deconstruction of the moviemaking process. When Travolta synchs his sound recording with newspaper photos of the car accident to create his own Zapruder film, the moment plays as much as a celebration of the power of cinema as it is a reveal of a vile conspiracy. Yet the film’s heady ambitions remain grounded by its bleak setting. Philadelphia, De Palma’s hometown, provides a grungy backdrop for the director’s hypnotic split diopter shots. A.J. Serrano (April 24, 7pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s tribute to cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond)